Automated correspondence generation systems often use either a “native” approach or a “flash” approach to generate correspondence. The native approach builds up each piece of correspondence one block at a time. This approach is very flexible in that the system is able to generate a wide variety of correspondence through the use of dynamic text. Dynamic text is text that is inserted or not inserted based on whether a certain condition exists.
The “flash” approach digitizes a correspondence template and then allows variable text, which is text that is inserted from client specific information, to be overlaid on the digitized image. This is usually accomplished by specifying the x and y coordinates at which the variable text should be placed. The digitized image of the template is then “flashed” on the printer and the variable text is printed over it. In general, the flash approach does not support dynamic text and, therefore, is somewhat limited in the variety of correspondence that can be automatically generated. While the native approach can quickly and efficiently generate all combinations of dynamic text strings or blocks in a given piece of correspondence, the flash approach typically stores each combination as a separate digitized template image. This may become unmanageable and inefficient as the number of conditions increase and the combinations of dynamic text strings or blocks multiply.
The approach used by an automated system to generate correspondence often depends on the language of the correspondence that must be supported by the system. For example, the native approach typically is used for languages that have a character set in which each character is represented by a single byte (e.g., the ASCII character set used to represent the English language). Most Western languages are single-byte languages.
The flash approach, on the other hand, is used for languages that have a character set in which each character is represented by multiple bytes. Most Eastern languages are multi-byte languages.